This splendid work of scholarship has already been extensively reviewed by Vincent Drost in Numismatic Chronicle for 2025 — but I am more than happy to add my own words of congratulation to Sam Moorhead on the completion of his monumental catalogue of the coins of Carausius and Allectus (c. a.d. 286–96).
Monumental it certainly is, the combined weight of the two volumes being only just shy of 5 kilograms. Volume 1 alone runs to some 708 pages, which makes it a little hard to handle: I am thinking of investing in an old-fashioned lecturn to stand it on! Given that Roger Bland’s newly published (13 August 2026) RIC IV – Part 3 also runs to some 640 pages, with a supplementary volume on the gold coinage to follow, it may be that the general editors of RIC will need to give serious consideration to the publication format of future volumes (though not, I beg, by banishing large parts of text, illustrations or catalogue online: those of us old enough to remember microfiche and, later, the CD at the back of the book will know how easy it is for crucial information to get buried once consigned to a different publication medium).
All that said, these second-edition volumes are large for very good reasons. The first editions of Roman Imperial Coinage (RIC), published at irregular intervals between 1923 and 1994, and also the revised edition of Volume 1 (1984), itemised relatively few types and provided only a representative number of illustrations of those types. RIC V.2, the 1933 catalogue of the coinage of Probus to Amandus, a.d. 276–294 by Percy Webb (a numismatist of yesteryear for whose work I have the greatest admiration), covered the ‘British Empire’ of Carausius and Allectus in 140-odd pages and four plates, listing some 1,260 types for Carausius and 250 for Allectus, but illustrating only 68 coins, 52 of Carausius and 16 of Allectus.
Since that date, thanks in no small part to the success of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, overseen for much of its existence by Sam Moorhead himself, the number of known types has increased exponentially, and Sam’s new catalogue presents close to a three-fold increase in the number of types described, containing a total of 4,265 entries, 3,696 for Carausius and 569 for Allectus. The author notes the ‘grey area’ between regular and counterfeit issues, wisely therefore including a few possibly counterfeit issues in the catalogue.
The accompanying 176 plates illustrate nearly 5,000 coins, including sometimes two or even three examples of the same type, a massively useful resource for which all cataloguers will be most grateful. The author notes that he has had to work with digital images of variable quality, where there is often also an issue with sizing — so that a number of images may not be precisely actual size. Furthermore, large numbers of entries are known from only one specimen, meaning that ‘the author has had to use that in the plates, whatever its state of preservation or the quality of the image’ — but there is no doubt in my mind that an imperfect image is greatly to be preferred to no image at all.
The illustrations comprise the second half of volume 2, the first half being taken up by concordances and indices. The concordances are a particularly useful feature of this work. The first of these provides a clear and well laid-out concordance to Webb’s first edition as well as to a number of other previous listings (with individual coin attributions also contained within the text of the catalogues). The second provides a concordance from the first edition to the second, a feature for which I, for one, am most grateful. This is an element missing from all the other second-edition RICs to date — and I have often bemoaned the lack when navigating between old and new reports. Its presence here will be a great time-saver.
The indices sensibly separate out Carausius and Allectus, for obverse and reverse legends, types and mint-marks. This is particularly useful when cataloguing coins of Allectus, since he employed far fewer types and mint-marks than his predecessor.
The catalogues, the second part of volume 1, are arranged by metal and denomination and, within that, where possible, by date. They perhaps take a little getting used to, since the catalogue number is given less prominence than the legend, but once you get used to that feature they are clear and easy to use. It is also extremely useful (to balance my earlier moan about the size of volume 1) to be able to have the illustrations, in the other volume, open alongside as you use the catalogue.
Finally, moving in reverse order, the introductory notes, running to some 260 pages, are a book in their own right. They leave one in awe at the immense amount of research that Sam has managed on this topic alongside all his other day-to-day tasks, and it is impossible to do justice here to all that they contain. To pick out just a couple of features, they include very large amounts of data which others will find an invaluable source of reference, not least the extensive tables of hoards terminating in coins of Carausius and Allectus; of later hoards containing coins of Carausius and Allectus; of continental hoards containing coins of Carausius and Allectus; and of major British site assemblages containing coins of Carausius and Allectus. These tables make it abundantly clear that, far from being dropped in a.d. 296 as being ‘too hot to handle’, quantities of Carausian and Allectan coinage continued in day-to-day use for some decades (something that I have been observing in stratified site finds for some time).
The notes also include an extensive study of types, legends and mint-marks, which in turn has allowed Moorhead to provide something of a chronology of the reign of Carausius (something which Webb did not attempt in the first edition). It completely replaces, for instance, a chronology suggested by John Casey in the 1990s based on a limited study of obverse legends. This approximate chronology will no doubt inform the debate surrounding particular issues, for example the historical context of coins bearing the legend CARAVSIVS ET FRATRES SVI (Carausius and his brothers), now assigned to c. a.d. 291–3.
Inevitably, questions remain, as Sam Moorhead quite freely admits, particularly on chronology and on the location of mints — but, even so, this book is a triumph of which the author should be proud.
